A.S. Byatt Quotes (17 Quotes)




    Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

    Something new, they had said. They had a perfect day for it. A day with the blue and gold good weather of anyone's primitive childhood expectations, when the new, brief memory tells itself that this is what is, and therefore was, and therefore will be. A good day to see a new place.

    That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.


    The whole of our scholarship - the whole of our thought - we question everything except the centrality of sexuality.

    They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side...He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

    Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.

    Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott . . . who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web - to ply an industrious shuttle - to make - something - to close the Shutters and the Peephole too -

    For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".


    Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets.


    I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things - once commenced - only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending - sweet or sour - and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay aside the unprofitable?

    I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.

    Independent women must expect more of themselves, since neither men nor other more conventionally domesticated women will hope for anything, or expect any result other than utter failure.

    It's exhausting. When everything's a deliberate political stance. Even if it's interesting.


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